Harold Altman

4/20/1924 - 7/28/2003

Harold Altman, a painter, printmaker and lithographer whose work was shown internationally and in major American museums including the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art.

For the last 40 years Mr. Altman lived and worked in a converted church in the village of Lemont, PA. He also kept an atelier in Paris, where he printed his lithographs.

Harold Altman was a professor emeritus of art at Pennsylvania State University. A native New Yorker and a regular in Paris, he drew inspiration from many places, as evidenced by series inspired by Central Park, the parks and markets of Paris, and the Pennsylvania countryside.

Altman was born in the Bronx. He studied at the Art Students League and Cooper Union in New York and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, where he had his first one-man show in 1951.

Altman used to spend one third of each year working in Paris where his lithographs were printed at Atelier DesJobert. In previous years his etchings were printed at Atelier George LeBlanc.

The artist's works have been exhibited at numerous galleries and museums, both in the United States and abroad. He is represented in nearly every significant collection in the world. New York's Museum of Modern Art owns over forty Altmans while the Whitney and Brooklyn Museums each have over fifty of his works in their permanent collections.

His work is to be found in many museum collections outside of the United States, several of which are the Victoria and Albert Museum of London, the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam, the Kunst Museum of Basel, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Copenhagen and the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris.

Altman received numerous awards, grants and fellowships. Among them are two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Tamarind Lithography Fellowship, a National Institute of the Arts and Letters Award, a Fulbright-Hayes Senior Research Fellowship for work in France and a National Endowment for the Arts Grant.

Saper Galleries had two solo exhibitons dedicated to the original lithographs of Harold Altman: in 1987 and in 1982. His work will continue to be an important part of the Saper Galleries inventory.